Theater and democracy were born in the same place at the same time – in Athens 2,500 years ago — and that is no coincidence: One led to the other.
The creation of theater festivals in the 6th century BCE brought the four warring tribes of Athens into a common space to share a common experience, which engendered a new sense of unity, and of community. ( “In a characteristic attempt to ensure full participation by the citizens,” one source notes, “those eligible were paid to attend the dramatic performances.” !!)
Democracy took root shortly after these festivals began. Athens’ unprecedented period of citizen power and engagement developed simultaneously with its unmatched burst of theatrical creativity led by the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Athenians understood the connection between theater and democracy, as Daniel Mendelsohn detailed in his New York Review article in 2016, How Greek Drama Saved The City:
“…when the philosopher Aristotle famously says that ‘the human is a political animal,’ he doesn’t mean that we are all like Lyndon Baines Johnson but, rather, that the human species is naturally social and civic—by nature suited to live in a polis. Over the course of the fifth century BCE, tragedy evolved into an ideal literary vehicle for exploring, and often questioning, the political, social, and civic values of Athens itself.”

(“polis” is the word the ancient Greeks use for their city-states, and one of the roots of the word “politics.”)

A theater mask created in the first century BCE

Late fifth century BCE statuette of an actor. Fourteen of these figures are said to have been found together in a burial in Attica. They are among the earliest known statuettes of actors and are superbly executed and preserved. Originally they were brightly painted. They document the beginning of standardized characters and masks, indicating the popularity not of a specific figure but of types—the old man, the slave, the courtesan, etc.—that appeared repeatedly in different plays. By the mid-fourth century B.CE., Attic examples or local copies were known throughout the Greek world, from Southern Russia to Spain.

A scene from The Persians by Aeschylus, the oldest surviving Greek drama, in a production performed last year at the 2,500-year-old theater at Epidaurus, Greece, which was designed by the architect Polykleitos the Younger

Epidaurus, Greece, built in the fourth century BCE, still in use audience

Howard Da Silva as Benjamin Franklin in “1776.” A long-time theater artist (he portrayed Jud Fry in the original “Oklahoma), Da Silva became a familiar to audiences of film, television and radio until his 1951 testimony, after which he was blacklisted for 10 years, from 1951 to 1961. He found refuge in the theater where he was Tony-nominated for his role in the 1960 “Fiorello,” about NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson with ensemble of Hamilton

Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn in Angels in America, 2018

Ben Whishaw and Tavi Gevinson, with Jason Butler Harner in The Crucible

Sweat on Broadway: Alison Wright, Will Pullen, Michelle Wilson

Times Square during the shut-down,

Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in the Park. Whatever else you may say about the moment that a Trump-like Julius Caesar – who wears suits with too-long ties, and has a Slavic wife – descended into his gold bathtub in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, it was certainly memorable. This was true (given all the attendant public outrage) even for people who didn’t see it. Opened in June, 2017

rioters who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, 2021

When I saw this from a distance I thought this was the Hamilton” logo. But it’s the absolute opposite — a federal officer pointing a “less-lethal” weapon toward protesters in Portland, Ore. in 2020 . Nathan Howard/Getty Image. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/inspector-general-investigates-portland-protests-lafayette-square/2020/07/23/4ed70812-cd15-11ea-bc6a-6841b28d9093_story.html

In the United States, people have used Shakespeare’s plays as a tool of political persuasion throughout American history, according to James Shapiro in his book, Shakespeare in a Divided America.   In 1916, to pick an ugly example,  the character of Caliban in “The Tempest” was interpreted in such a way as to feed arguments  for restrictions on immigration.

Nowadays, Mendelsohn contends in his article on the Greeks, “popular theater and politics are two distinct realms,” although he does concede there are some exceptions, such as “The Crucible” and “Angels in America”. Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, sees many more, such as “Hamilton,” “The Normal Heart,””Sweat.”  Most to the point, he believes that initial connection in Ancient Greece between theater and democracy continues to this day. In his TedTalk in 2018 entitled “Why theater is essential to democracy,”  Eustis maintains that theater allows for the collision of different ideas; that it engenders empathy; and, since it requires an audience, it creates community. All three, he says, are the basic tools of citizenship in a democratic society.

So it’s ironic, and annoying, that “political theater” is commonly used these days as shorthand in the political realm for action without substance, something false or unserious that undermines democracy.
The day after a group of Trump supporters violently invaded the U.S. Capitol, two political scientists wrote an essay in the Washington Post excoriating Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz for challenging the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory, which they argue persuasively was a cynical ploy that both ambitious Republicans knew was false, and that helped encourage the riot. But they make their argument using theater as an extended metaphor; three examples:
“Senators with presidential ambitions cannot treat fundamental beliefs about democracy as something they can put on and take off like a costume, returning to real life when the curtain drops.”
“…amateur dramatics led a misinformed audience to storm the stage…”
“…we can go back to enjoying the political performances — and shrugging when the players ham it up — only if everyone knows it’s a play, and the machinery behind the curtain is strong.”
Two other political scientists take issue with just such “narrow rendering of ‘the theatre metaphor’ in politics,” in an academic paper from 2017 with the (very academic) title From senseless to sensory democracy: Insights from applied and participatory theatre, which they attempt to explain more accessibly in a blog post What can theatre do for democracy?

Democracy, it must be said, is an ideal that is no more fully realized in the American theater than it is in American society as a whole.  But over the last year, there has been a newly revitalized struggle to fulfill the promise of democracy in both theater and in society. “My hope is that because change is possible, it is also within reach,” Patrick Meyers of the Alliance Theater of Atlanta writes in What Stacey Abrams Can Teach Us About Changing Our Theatres – an essay in American Theatre that explores the latest iteration of a connection established thousands of years ago.

In this new year of 2021, both theater and democracy are under attack, in different ways. The pandemic has shut down physical theaters since March, and are unlikely to return until “some time in the fall of 2021,” as Dr.Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the United States, said yesterday at the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals – which, like most everything else involving theater these days, is being held virtually. This unprecedented long “intermission” (as theater makers have put it in an effort to boost morale) threatens the survival of individual companies and individual artists.
And democracy is clearly under attack, given the violent storming of the Capitol, egged on by the false accusations and exhortations by the elected leader of the Republic, supported by a shocking number of complicit elected officials.
We are coming to understand how fragile democracy is. It is not a given. Athenian democracy, depending on which historian you listen to, lasted little more than a century. The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788; there is argument of course when it was that true democracy kicked in.
Advocates of late have argued that only the government can save the theater. But, there is a mirror argument that theater can also help save democracy — because of its potential, as Hamlet puts it, to hold “the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time [its] form and pressure.”